How does Adranik become the bloodiest emperor? This is the question I mull over when I’m awake again but still paralyzed. He was the softer child, the one who couldn’t even hunt without crying. How did he preserve the runners’ parade when his carnivore brother didn’t? How did he break his mistress’s jaw when his own father built whole rooms for the comfort of his wife? Maybe that’s the point. Everyone already knew Nik Nik was good for blood. When he took over he had nothing to prove. It was the opposite—people were tense, afraid he’d be worse than his dad. When he canceled the parades everyone breathed a sigh of relief, but still eyed him warily.

Adranik must have had everything to prove. Maybe he couldn’t cancel the parades because everyone expected him to. Maybe it was self-preservation, the way the smallest animals are the first to growl, the first to bite.

Or maybe he only hated hunting because he was afraid of the game, and seeing someone else spill blood sat with him just fine.

I’ve been taken out of the castle. With half an inhale I can tell I’m not even in central Ashtown anymore. The acid tang is out of the air, and I don’t realize how used to it I’ve already grown until it’s gone. This room smells like a hospital, heavy-duty cleaner not quite hiding the soft dirt smell. I open my eyes just a slit. The all-white room surprises me. I’m still in Ash, but the Rurals, I’m guessing.

    I make out a shape loading linens into a large supply closet. He’s wearing the tunics I’m used to seeing when I visit my family, the ones Nik Nik seems to enjoy here. This one started white, but is now the dingy gray of a tea stain. I test my limbs—a little laggy, but good enough.

I sit up and he turns around. Our eyes lock. Daniel. But he’s not my stepfather, not here. There’s surprise in his eyes, but no affection. I spring, shoving him into the supply closet he was loading, and force the double doors closed against him. I wrap a sheet around the handles to keep them closed. He’s pushing against it, yelling, and already the sheets are loosening. It won’t hold long.

The smell of dirt and the presence of Daniel tells me where I am: the vacant rooms in my stepfather’s new church. I put my collar back on and tap the center to begin the warm-up, then I run. I emerge in a hall just off the main auditorium and sprint for the double doors at the entrance. I’ve almost reached them when a shape steps into my path.

“You?”

Even though I recognize him, it takes me a second to remember his name. Mr. Cheeks is still pretty, and still smiling, but now his face sickens me. He’s a runner in a place where they still live up to their name. He looks just like the man who took my money a few weeks ago, except for the new tattoo at the center of his throat: a star within a star.

It strikes me, and I can’t keep from saying, “Someone loves you?”

He tilts his head. “You read runner tattoos too? I knew Nelline could, but I’d expect a girl well preserved as you comes from the city.”

His mention of Nelline, Nelline as someone other than me, calms me down. She had said “his man” told her Nik Nik wanted me. And Nik Nik had said the runner he trusted went out to border patrol in the afternoons. If I’d asked myself who worked border patrol in the afternoons back home, I would have known to expect him.

“I do,” I say. “I just didn’t always.”

He nods, casting a shadow over his love mark. When it goes bad, because he’s young and it always does, he’ll fill in the star with black and draw a circle around it. An ink-dark hole will mark his heartbreak.

    “Let me go.”

“Can’t. Sorry, but we need you.”

It wasn’t what I expected to hear. Sorry, he wants you, maybe. Or, Sorry, just doing my job.

“Who’s we?”

“She’s coming.”

I hear them now, the light and delicate footsteps. I should have guessed who they belong to, given my location, but when she enters the room I am unprepared.

Esther. My Esther. Her clothes are understated as always, but only the cuts are modest while the material is heavy, expensive. Nothing like she can afford back home. There’s something off with her face. Once I identify what it is, I go a little rabid.

I start walking toward her. Mr. Cheeks moves between us. I push past him.

“Who broke your nose, Essie?” I get close enough to see that her front incisor is fake. “Who knocked out your tooth?”

Someone has been punching my delicate little sister in the face. Someone’s about to die.

She smiles. It’s sad and bruised. If she means to disarm me it has the opposite effect.

“My husband.”

The words spin me. They’re full of shame, shame she shouldn’t own, and I connect the words with Cheeks’s tattoo quickly.

He’s standing too close to avoid the first hit, but he catches my wrist easily on the second and shoves me back. He’s had a lifetime of fighting, and I’m out of practice.

“She’s barely eighteen!” I scream in his face, the words half spit.

“Not me,” he says. “I’d never.”

“Then who?”

“Someone you can’t attack, but thank you for thinking to try,” Esther says, coming between us.

    She’s as gracious in this world as she is on mine. If there are souls that are pure, that are insulated from things that are done to them and remain the same whether they are gutter born or tower bound, Esther is one. The knowable.

My wife is elegant and pure. She’s an angel.

It clicks.

“The emperor?”

She nods. “We hoped you could help us get him out of power. Nik said you…know things.”

Adra was wrong. My sister is polite, but polite and angelic are two different things. Everyone makes that mistake. They think hair like snow means angel, and eyes like the sky mean saint. But my sister would ostracize someone to their death if they threatened her church. She could teach me lessons in ruthlessness. It’s what I first liked about her. If she was what people saw when they looked at her, she’d have no more use than a porcelain doll.

She sits on the church’s stage. In my mind the image overlaps with her sitting on my cot during my visit. She’s younger than I was when I took up with Nik Nik, and I was still too young. Mr. Cheeks sits beside her, arm over her shoulders.

Sloppy runner.

I break for the exit, putting my palm over my necklace to make sure it’s warmed up. Not quite, but close enough. Mr. Cheeks scrambles behind me, but he’s too late. I’m almost to the doors and they’re opening before me like the gates of heaven…except it isn’t God, it’s Nik Nik.

I slow to a stop and hear Mr. Cheeks doing the same behind me. I expect him to grab me, but he doesn’t. He’s looking past me.

“Why were you chasing her?”

“She can help us,” Mr. Cheeks says.

“That’s not your decision. You were to barter with Nelline for her freedom, not a new capture,” Nik Nik says, looking down at me. “Is there somewhere I can take you?”

I move toward him cautiously, feeling like those birds that take food from the teeth of mudcrocs. He’s holding open the door, and through it I can see the butane sky. The sun’s not even up all the way, but it’s a bright day, so it’s nearly noon-light. My collar vibrates its readiness.

    “Wait!”

Somewhere, deep inside, I must be looking for something on 175, something I haven’t found yet. Because when my sister screams for me, I turn back.

“Look at you,” she says. “Your skin has no spots, your teeth are whole. There’s no film in your eyes. Your world has been so, so kind to you. Don’t you feel anything, any…obligation to help us taste just a little of that peace?”

Nope. And it’s on my lips to tell her so. To tell her that I got to the city on my own two feet, with no stranger from another world to help me, and I don’t owe anyone anything.

Except, that’s not true, is it?

There’s the workers who raised me, who took me in after my mom’s death and taught me how to seduce the most powerful man in the wastes. Did I ever reach back to them? Did I ever thank them? Have I ever thanked Jean? Or prayed in thanks for Caramenta, by whose blood I’ve risen to heights I did not even know the words to wish for? I look over her shoulder at Nik Nik, the sometimes Blood Emperor who nursed me back from death.

Sometimes, focusing on survival is necessary. Sometimes, it is just an excuse for selfishness.

Still, I shake my head. “Dethroning an emperor? This is none of my business.”

“Please?” she says.

And the longer I stare at her, the harder it is to walk away. Partly because she’s still Esther. Sure, the nose is twisted, but those eyes, those are my Esther’s eyes. But mostly I’m struck because the parts of her that aren’t like my Esther, the traces of shadow where a powerful man has been breaking his hand against her bones, those are me. Or used to be me. Or are me somewhere, on some world, right now. I don’t know who I would be if I could turn my back on that. Someone else, probably.

    I reach up, putting my collar back to sleep.